Supporting Rising Americana in Virginia

I’m trying to be a better citizen of my home state’s music. 

Over the past seven years of playing music, I’ve met so many Virginia-based artists who make great music. Virginia’s talent pool runs deep. After all, we gave the world Morgan Wade, Pharrell Williams, Bruce Hornsby, Aimee Mann, and so many more. Hell, we gave the world The Carter Family - country music as we know it was born here. The music coming out of today’s local scenes across the commonwealth is insanely good and is worth celebrating and sharing.

Mother Maybelle Carter, from Southwest Virginia. influenced the course of modern guitar technique across all genres with her recording of "Wildwood Flower." 

The best way to support local music is by making it to the shows, but I often can’t make it to my friends’ gigs because I also play music on most weekends. This is especially true now that I’ve moved to Northern Virginia and can’t practically make it to a lot of shows in the Harrisonburg/Valley scene. With this in mind, I’ve been searching for a way to be a better supporter of the Virginia roots music scene, and then it hit me - why not create a Spotify playlist that shares music from Virginia artists I love and promote it every week via social media? 

And so I did. The Rising Virginia Americana playlist is now live on Spotify, and features artists from Virginia, including local heroes, friends, and big names alike. 

For future issues of my newsletter Fiction & Fact, I’ll include a list of the newest additions to the playlist, along with links to the artist's website and/or social media. It’s so important to support music coming out of Virginia, and I hope you’ll follow along as we build our commonwealth’s music scene!

Since I’ll be updating this playlist weekly, follow it at the link below to see the newest additions. Shoot me an email too if there are any artists you’d like to see added!